The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does not prevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge in arbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may as reasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might be more. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universe is not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must view everything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when life is so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of little importance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humane demand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not be unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality that may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made by conscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described by mechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it are tentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vital equilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and no theory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptive euphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what we find: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearance in some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the physical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and a natural prosperity.
CHAPTER IV
HESITATIONS IN METHOD
Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.
When Democritus proclaimed the sovereignty of mechanism, he did so in the oracular fashion proper to an ancient sage. He found it no harder to apply his atomic theory to the mind and to the gods than to solids and fluids. It sufficed to conceive that such an explanation might be possible, and to illustrate the theory by a few scattered facts and trenchant hypotheses. When Descartes, after twenty centuries of verbal physics, reintroduced mechanism into philosophy, he made a striking modification in its claims. He divided existence into two independent regions, and it was only in one, in the realm of extended things, that mechanism was expected to prevail. Mental facts, which he approached from the side of abstracted reflection and Platonic ideas, seemed to him obviously non-extended, even when they represented extension; and with them mechanism could have nothing to do. Descartes had recovered in the science of mechanics a firm nucleus for physical theory, a stronghold from which it had become impossible to dislodge scientific methods. There, at any rate, form, mass, distance, and other mathematical relations governed the transformation of things. Yet the very clearness and exhaustiveness of this mechanical method, as applied to gross masses in motion, made it seem essentially inapplicable to anything else. Descartes was far too radical and incisive a thinker, however, not to feel that it must apply throughout nature. Imaginative difficulties due to the complexity of animal bodies could not cloud his rational insight. Animal bodies, then, were mere machines, cleancut and cold engines like so many anatomical manikins. They explained themselves and all their operations, talking and building temples being just as truly a matter of physics as the revolution of the sky. But the soul had dropped out, and Descartes was the last man to ignore the soul. There had dropped out also the secondary qualities of matter, all those qualities, namely, which are negligible in mechanical calculations. Mechanism was in truth far from universal; all mental facts and half the properties of matter, as matter is revealed to man, came into being without asking leave; they were interlopers in the intelligible universe. Indeed, Descartes was willing to admit that these inexplicable bystanders might sometimes put their finger in the pie, and stir the material world judiciously so as to give it a new direction, although without adding to its substance or to its force.
The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent chance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born mechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one quarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to treat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is true, the only existences that remained remained entirely without calculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of ideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be unwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues, that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic of modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background and chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas could be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted a sufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little moment in comparison.
Men of science not speculative.
Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded in its patient course without caring particularly what status the metaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an advantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt his methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without insisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of his discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his speculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations. Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the ultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent immense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather than in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater naturalness have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies in things, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the inner texture of the process has not been laid bare.
This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the scientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another proof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is willing to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it cannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it will describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; and where types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In this way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their results, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in anthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology and archæology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is enough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund of information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to his mind: and if his apprehension follows that movement—not breaking in upon it with extraneous matter—it will be scientific apprehension.